Archive for July, 2011

The Norway/Oslo shooter, Anders Behring Breivik is apparently a Christian, according to certain parties.

A non-practicing Christian who murders people in direct opposition to You shall not murder (Exodus 20:12) and Love your enemy (Matthew 5:24).

And who believes that being a Christian does not necessarily constitute that you are required to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus; Christian fundamentalist theocracy… everything we DO NOT want… secular European society…what we DO want; It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian-atheist; and it is essential that science take an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings.

Similarly, I am a non-practicing vegetarian who eats pork chops and bacon.

Also, I am a non-practicing Muslim who has never once carried out, or even thought about carrying out, any of the Five Pillars of Islam. And eats pork chops and bacon.

Did I mention I am also a non-practicing atheist who overtly believes in God and the supernatural? Please inform the media when I finally snap and go on a shooting spree that I have always firmly avowed myself as an rational-minded atheist. “IN THE NAME OF NO GOD!!!!dakka dakka dakka dakka

And in a third country, the government is in a tussle with its elected representatives as the country hurdles towards defaulting on its US$14.5tril (RM43.4tril) debt.

The term is hurtles, not hurdles. Though I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that the process is full of obstacles that have to be jumped.

The British claimed the industrial revolution as its own and is rightly credited for turning manufacturing into becoming the mainstay of the global economy.

The British is plural, but is referred to as the singular its.

Turning = Becoming, why the redundacy? Read the whole sentence out loud and hear how clunky it is.

It is now a shadow of its glory days and at best is the rabble rousers in the European Union (EU) zone. Gone are its colonies in every far-flung corner of the world that kept its super economy running.

Again, first it denotes singular, then rabbles rousers turns it into plural.

Now the British have even got to putting for sale its huge Chancery in Kuala Lumpur because it would be cheaper for the High Commission to operate out of a commercial building.

Singular becomes plural again.

As for the United States, wasn’t it the leader of the free world and the fatherland of industrialisation where hardwork is always rewarded with ample financial gain?

Goodness. The above sounds like a bad parody of Nineteen Eighty-Four Newspeak.

Go to the website http://www.usdebtclock.org/ and you will get the real time feeling of how much the land of the brave and free owe the rest of the world.

Sigh, again with the singular and plural.

The land as the subject here is singular, so you’re supposed to use owes. ‘The brave and the free’ would be plural if used by itself.

It will probably take hundreds of PhD thesis to explain what went wrong for these three nations but suffice to say that successive governments did not do enough to prevent their economies from falling into such a dark hole.

On top of that politics has played a strong role in pushing these economies into even darker places.

What is the plural of thesis?

Much of my gripe is with the terms used. So… Unimaginative. I just feel there are so many better choices of words or metaphors that could be used. Like in the above case, ‘a fiscal black hole’ or ‘a financial Sisyphean pit’ would be more interesting choices than ‘such a dark hole’.

And when a fancy metaphor is used, it seems shoehorned in at an awkward angle.

Finally, on the factual side, any layperson should be able to see what went wrong: Far too much government spending. (In fact, read on and witness teh hypocrisy!!!1one!)

But wasn’t it their foolhardiness that brought Greece to this position in the first place.

Where did the question mark at the end get lovelessly flung to?

The same can be said of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and many of the old eastern block countries.

The term is Eastern Bloc. No ‘k’ at the end. Good grief!

As for the United States, the rivalry of Republicans and Demo-crats is threatening to send the world into possibly the biggest depression ever as there is less than 10 days left before America defaults on that huge debt.

10 days left is plural and so demands ‘are’, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt again that he means a ‘period of less than 10 days’. But Demo hyphen crats?

The Republicans, who control the House of Representatives are refusing to approve President Barack Obama’s proposed budget on the debt ceiling because they claim it would hurt the American economy (read the rich).

I’m bashing the grammar and language here, not the politics, but I can’t let this just slide.

Yes, surprisingly our country’s debt is not a huge mountain as some people would like us to believe, but what is worrying is the lack of support for efforts to reduce it further.

A sure way of doing it is by reducing subsidies.

Liberal-leaning is one, and hypocrisy is another.

If you follow Wong Sai Wan’s reasoning, the Republicans are the real meanies who would rather default than hurt their rich pals. (Conveniently, no mention of the fact that the insane US debt threatening the default is caused by massively wasteful spending.)

Meanwhile, reduce subsidies to save Malaysia!

And recall, just a short while ago the claim was that ‘hundreds of PhD thesis’ (sic) would be needed to find out why the Greek, British and American economies are in trouble!

What a shill.

The most popular comments against Malaysia’s spending cuts has been to ask the Government to reduce the leakages before even thinking of cutting back on subsidies.

Comments = plural.

Has = used for singular.

What a hack.

> Executive editor Wong Sai Wan has been through three recessions and fears the fourth the most.

Yes, because with this shoddy level of writing, we all know who is already marked for downsizing.

Don’t think the overall quality of writing is that bad? Go briefly read that piece by Thomas Sowell again and then come back to Wong Sai Wan’s piece.

The contrast is startling.

UPDATE: Okay, some of his other work is much better. It makes me wonder if today’s piece was actually slapped ghost written by an intern and he slapped his name on it for appropriation.

While arguments for cuts in high tax rates have often been made by free-market economists or conservatives in the American sense, such arguments have also sometimes been made by people who were neither, including John Maynard Keynes and President John F. Kennedy, who in fact got tax rates cut during his administration.

…

High rates drive taxpayers into shelters.

Mellon pointed out that, under the high income-tax rates at the end of the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1921, vast sums of money had been put into tax shelters such as tax-exempt municipal bonds instead of being invested in the private economy, where this money would create more output, incomes and jobs — thereby producing higher tax revenues for the federal government.

…

The actual results of the cuts in tax rates in the 1920s were very similar to the results of later tax-rate cuts during the Kennedy, Reagan and George. W. Bush administrations — namely, rising output, rising employment to produce that output, rising incomes as a result and rising tax revenues for the government because of the rising incomes, though the tax rates had been lowered.

…

The facts are unmistakably plain, for those who bother to check the facts. In 1921, when the tax rate on people making over $100,000 a year was 73%, the federal government collected a little over $700 million in income taxes, of which 30% was paid by those making over $100,000.

By 1929, after a series of tax-rate reductions had cut the tax rate to 24% on those making over $100,000, the federal government collected more than a billion dollars in income taxes, of which 65% was collected from those making over $100,000.

There is nothing mysterious about this. Under the sharply rising tax rates during the Wilson administration, fewer and fewer people reported high taxable incomes, whether by putting their money into tax-exempt securities or by any of the other ways of rearranging their financial affairs to minimize their tax liability.

Under Wilson’s escalating income-tax rates to pay for the high costs of the First World War, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of more than $300,000 — a huge sum in the money of that era — declined from well over a thousand in 1916 to fewer than three hundred in 1921. The total amount of taxable income earned by people making over $300,000 declined by more than four-fifths in those years.

Secretary Mellon estimated in 1923 that the money invested in tax-exempt securities had tripled in a decade, and was now almost three times the size of the federal government’s annual budget and nearly half as large as the national debt. “The man of large income has tended more and more to invest his capital in such a way that the tax collector cannot touch it,” he pointed out.

…

The facts are plain: There were 206 people who reported annual taxable incomes of one million dollars or more in 1916. But as tax rates rose, that number fell to 21 by 1921. After a series of tax-rate cuts in the 1920s, the number of individuals reporting taxable incomes of a million dollars or more rose again, to 207 by 1925.

As output surged, joblessness plunged.

It should not be surprising that the government collected more tax revenue under these conditions. Nor is it surprising that, with increased economic activity resulting from more investment in the private economy, the annual unemployment rate from 1925 through 1928 ranged from a high of 4.2% to a low of 1.8%.

The “global minimum tax” would be levied by the IRS on American companies with foreign components abroad. So if Mexico, say (I’m making up numbers) taxes business at 25%, thus encouraging US companies to move a plant over there, Biden’s regime would impose some higher tax, who knows, 35%, with the 10% excess imposed by the IRS and going to the US treasury.

…

In practice, it could lead to more American corporations being sold to foreign investors: Because the U.S. only taxes the profits of U.S. companies, one way to dodge the new “global minimum tax” would be to invite a takeover by a foreign company. Which, depending upon how high the new minimum tax is and how many companies flee, could mean less overall tax revenue than before.

…

The simple fact is that our rates or too high to be competitive. Rather than lowering our rates, Team Obama’s answer is what it always is: Let’s raise rates even higher, even on plants in foreign companies.

Secretary Mellon pointed out that previously the government “received substantially the same revenue from high incomes with a 13 percent surtax as it received with a 65 percent surtax.” Higher tax rates do not mean higher tax revenues.

High tax rates on high incomes, Mellon said, lead many of those who earn such incomes to withdraw their money “from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities” or otherwise find ways to avoid receiving income in taxable forms.

After Mellon finally succeeded in getting Congress to lower the top tax rate from 73 percent to 24 percent, the government actually received more tax revenues at the lower rate than it had at the higher rate. Moreover, it received a higher proportion of all income taxes from the top income earners than before.

Something similar happened in later years, after tax rates were cut under Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and G.W. Bush. The record is clear.

And again:

There is, of course, the perennial fallacy that the government can simply raise taxes on “the rich” and use that additional revenue to pay for things that most people cannot afford. What is amazing is the implicit assumption that “the rich” are all such complete fools that they will do nothing to prevent their money from being taxed away. History shows otherwise.

After the Constitution of the United States was amended to permit a federal income tax, in 1916, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of $300,000 a year or more fell from well over a thousand to fewer than three hundred by 1921.

Were the rich all getting poorer? Not at all. They were investing huge sums of money in tax-exempt securities. The amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities was larger than the federal budget, and nearly half as large as the national debt.

This was not unique to the United States or to that era. After the British government raised their income tax on the top income earners in 2010, they discovered that they collected less tax revenue than before. Other countries have had similar experiences. Apparently the rich are not all fools, after all.

In today’s globalized world economy, the rich can simply invest their money in countries where tax rates are lower.

Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy spoke plainly about the fact that higher tax rates on individuals and businesses did not automatically translate into higher tax revenues for the government. Beyond some point, high tax rates on those with high incomes simply led to those incomes being invested in tax-free bonds, with the revenue from those bonds being completely lost to the government — and the investments lost to the economy.

As President John F. Kennedy put it, “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” This was because investors’ “efforts to avoid tax liabilities” make “certain types of less productive activity more profitable than more valuable undertakings,” and this in turn “inhibits our growth and efficiency.”

…

This disconnect between higher tax rates and higher tax revenues is not peculiar to the United States. Iceland and India both collected more tax revenue after tax rates were cut. In Iceland the corporate tax rate was cut from 45 percent to 18 percent between 1991 and 2001 — and the revenue from corporate taxes tripled at the lower rate.

…

John Maynard Keynes said in 1933 that “given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the budget.”

And:

It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country.

Russian aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky could take his expertise to America and produce his planes and helicopters thousands of miles away from his native land. Financiers are even less tied down, especially today, when vast sums of money can be dispatched electronically to any part of the world.

If confiscatory policies can produce counterproductive repercussions in a dictatorship, they are even harder to carry out in a democracy. A dictatorship can suddenly swoop down and grab whatever it wants. But a democracy must first have public discussions and debates. Those who are targeted for confiscation can see the handwriting on the wall, and act accordingly.

The people who went to Bersih 2.0 are Malaysians who will forever feel united and bound to each other because of that experience. Some may have been politicians and NGOs but so many more were just people of every race, religion, age and creed.

…

Perhaps we should take another leaf from Sept 11. In the wake of the death and destruction wreaked by the US government to avenge the World Trade Centre deaths, some of the families of those who died, horrified by such violent vengeance, started an NGO called Not In Our Name.

I said it before about this Malaysiakini letter writer who similarly marched against the invasion of Iraq and then marched in Bersih, and I’ll say it again about Ms Marina:

You support demonstrations against the over-reactive Malaysian government who deploy tear gas and chemical-laced water cannon… Yet you consider morally deplorable the act of overthrowing the Iraqi dictator who far more brutally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen?

No, really… You feel BN manipulates elections and deserves a protest, but you don’t agree that a real unprovoked warmonger who sponsored torture, rape and chemical attacks on civilians deserved to be ousted with any more force than the usual UN-stamped letter of complaint?

I mean, try imagining a What-If scenario where BN turns full-on despotic dictator tyrant and starts slaughtering protestors on the streets, then invades Singapore which causes the UN to impose life-strangling sanctions on all of us. Ten years of this later, would you hail President Sarah Palin’s ‘Operation Trash BN’ invasion force as oppressors, or liberators? And when some former UMNO Youth hotheads respond by blowing us up in hospitals, schools. markets and mosques so that they can be the new bosses once the Americans leave in disgust, would you support the US Marines who shield you from shrapnel with their very bodies, or the Khairy-hideen suicide squads?

Like this:

From my experience debating in the posts and comments of the Internet, I’ve come to realize something: Each person has his or her own metric by which they weight evidence and arguments, and their own level of skepticism that needs to be overcome before they are convinced of a point.

I’ve always leaned towards objectivity and neutrality when it comes to debates. Not so far as to venture into relative truth territory – “Oh sure that may be true for you, but not for me” – as I believe that there is always an absolute trtuh. Whether we can conclusively determine what the absolute truth is, is another matter.

That last point brings me back to Personal Standards of Proof. To better understand what I’m getting at, let’s begin with the concept of reasonable doubt – ‘the level of certainty a juror must have to find a defendant guilty of a crime’.

For example: Zed was found at the crime scene covered in the victim’s blood, with his hand clutching the victim’s guts, and with sixteen separate witnesses to the crime – ten of them with cellphone cameras capturing the murder in real time. I as a juror would find this evidence that Zed committed a murder, beyond reasonable doubt.

Conrasting example: Wilma is accused of having bludgeoned to death the media tycoon Sir Ramsey. However, she did not know the man, had no motive to kill him, is half the former amateur wrestler Ramsey’s size, and her World of Warcraft account is shown to have been logged in and active at the time the murder was committed. Hence I as a juror would have plenty reasonable doubt that she did in fact commit the murder.

Similar to the above, but applied to areas beyond criminal persecutions, differing Personal Standards of Proof cause each person to come to different conclusions.

For example: A slew of IPCC reports might be enough ‘proof’ to convince John that global warming is a dire threat caused primarily by human emissions of CO2. Meanwhile, a slew of exposés of the shoddy science underlying those same reports might be enough ‘proof’ to convince Suzy that global warming is an overblown, dishonest scare.

Another example: A series of unlikely events occurs that seem to be in direct answer to a religious prayer. To Michael, this is proof enough that God is real and answers prayers. Whereas to Betty, this can be dismissed as pure coincidence, albeit with a cumulatively low random probability.

In short: What may be conclusive and inassailable to me, may not be as watertight and bulletproof to you. And what may constitute ‘good enough’ to you, may fall short to me.

From all of this, I’ve settled into a position where I present my points, arguments and citations to support my position. I will also rebutt and undermine those raised by my opponents. If I feel that they are not seeing a certain item clearly or that their interpretation is inaccurate, I will point it out to them.

But at the end of the day, I accept that neither of us will likely change our minds – despite all the ‘proof’ that was flung about. Hence I can let the debate trail off without thinking that my opponent is an utterly biased imbecile. Oh, he or she may very well actually be one, just that I don’t automatically assume so just because we come to different conclusions.

So back to “Oh sure that may be true for you, but not for me”. Although there is an absolute, undeniable truth, that saying is actually quite applicable real life – because a very convincing argument to John may be a shoddy argument to Suzy. Based on the same set of incomplete, imperfectly proven data available, they each will come to their own different conclusions.

I WAS dismayed to read “Waging war on a timetable” (The Star, June 26). Before being assigned to Kuala Lumpur I worked for a year in Afghanistan, and based on that experience found this article to be long on cliches and short on substance.

For starters, while Afghanistan remains a difficult and challenging place, the writer seems to have totally overlooked the progress that has been made there in the past 10 years.

As US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton noted in her June 23 testimony before the U.S. Senate, “Under the Taliban, only 900,000 boys and no girls were enrolled in schools. By 2010, 7.1 million students were enrolled, nearly 40% of them girls.

“Hundreds of thousands of farmers have been trained and equipped with new seeds and other techniques. Afghan women have used more than 100,000 micro finance loans. Infant mortality is down 22%”.

That is a remarkable turnaround for a country that had suffered through almost 30 years of war.

Of greater concern is the misleading discussion on civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The article only discusses civilian casualties related to actions by ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force.

But as the United Nations annual summary of the state of civilian casualties in Afghanistan (published on March 9) makes clear, Taliban insurgents are responsible for more than three-fourths, or 2,080, of the 2,777 civilian deaths reported.

That number represents a 28% increase over the data reported in the previous year.

The article not only glosses over Taliban atrocities, it misses the crucial distinction between the casualties caused by the Taliban and other insurgents and those caused by ISAF.

The Taliban deliberately target civilians, burn schools, and use children to carry out suicide attacks, whereas ISAF takes great care to avoid actions which could imperil civilians.

Because of the nature of war, mistakes do unfortunately happen and there have been civilians caught in the crossfire of ISAF engagements with insurgents.

But the number of civilian casualties caused by ISAF has dropped for the third straight year, while the number of casualties caused by insurgents has gone up steadily every year going back to 2006.

Afghanistan faces a challenging transition to full government control over its security and economic development in the years ahead, and continued support from the international community will be vital.

Equally important to marshalling that support will be clear, fact-based analyses of the state of affairs in that country, for which many people rely on respected media sources such as The Star.

Mukhriz mentions “1,200,000 innocent men, women and children” killed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq by American troops, but not once does he mention that of these innocent civilians killed, the vast and overwhelming majority were the victims of terrorists, not troops under former US president George W. Bush’s orders.

Does Mukhriz not acknowledge that the vast majority of those that the American troops targeted and killed were not civilians, but illegal combatants who were trying to kill soldiers and civilians?

Or that these terrorists were bombing their own Iraqi brothers and sisters in marketplaces and mosques in order to bully them into acquiesence?

Or that the “illegal American occupiers” often went out of their way and put themselves at additional risk in order to avoid civilian casualties?

Does he not acknowledge that the same Opinion Research Business survey he quotes from also states that 21 per cent died of car bombs, four per cent of sectarian violence and one per cent of kidnappings?

That is more than a quarter of all deaths clearly not due to the direct acts of American soldiers. And this does not include the 40 per cent of casualties from shootings that the terrorist thugs were responsible for.

…

He boldly claims, too, that going to war — including on a false pretext — cannot create peace. Does he refuse to admit that Iraqis today have more peace and freedom than any time in the past 30 years of despotism and deprivation?

Does he refuse to admit that the violent death rate has undeniably dropped to peacetime levels, with 85 per cent of Iraqis polled by the British Broadcasting Corporation last month describing the current situation as being “very good” or “quite good”?

There’s a list of my Iraq-related posts, including various published letters, at bottom of here.

Item 7 Shallow affect – I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.” (SFC Jared Monti, 10th Mountain Division, was KIA in Afghanistan in 2006. He was posthumously awarded the MOH by Obama in 2009.)

Item 15 Irresponsibility – Obama’s team may not include the president himself. Despite the impasse in Washington over federal spending, the president as of early Wednesday was scheduled to give two speeches outside of Washington.

Item 16 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions – Barack Obama blamed Bush today for the national deficit that he just tripled in one year.

Item 17 Many short-term marital relationships

Item 18 Juvenile delinquency

Item 19 Revocation of conditional release

Item 20 Criminal versatility – I have been researching, documenting and studying thousands upon thousands of Obama’s campaign donations for the past month. Egregious abuse was immediately evident and I published the results of my ongoing investigation. Each subsequent post built a more damning case against Obama’s illegal contribution activity.

Summary of Me

scottthongblog[at]yahoo[dot]com

Seeking truth, hating lies.

Oh my labels!

Free thinking, but not a Free Thinker.
A Christian and a scientist, but not a Christian Scientist.
Believing in a universal church, but not a Catholic.
Trying to be a saint in these latter days, but not a Latter Day Saint.
A witness for Jehovah, but not a Jehovah's Witness.
Sumitted to God, but not a Muslim.
Seeking knowledge, but not a Gnostic.
Rational in thinking, but not a Rationalist.
Upholding humanity, but not a Humanist.
A supporter of liberation, but not a Liberal.
A supporter of democracy, but not a Democrat.
Acknowledging the importance of social values, but not a Socialist.
Seeking and valuing truth, but not a Truther.